Lanny had to say something, so he asked: “How come?”
“They feel the same way about the war. Jesse can't see any difference at all between French and Germans.”
“I don't think that's exactly true of Robbie,” said the boy, hesitatingly — for he didn't like to talk about his father in this connection. He added: “I've never understood my uncle's ideas, but I know how Robbie despises them.”
“It's a case of extremes meeting, I suppose,” remarked the other. “Jesse is an out-and-out revolutionist. He blames all the trouble on big financiers trying to grab colonies and trade. He says they use the governments for their own purposes; they start wars when they want something, and stop them when they've got it.”
“Well, it looks like this one might have run away with them,” commented the boy.
“Jesse says not so,” replied the other. “He thinks the British oil men want Mesopotamia, and they've promised Constantinople to Russia, and Syria to France. Also they want to sink the German fleet. After that their oil will be safe, and they'll make peace.”
“Do you believe anything like that, Marcel?”
The voice that came from behind the white silk veil had a touch of grimness. “I'd hate having to think that I'd had my face burned off to help Royal Dutch Shell increase the value of its shares!”
V
Lanny wrote to his father: “I am finding it hard to think as you want me to.” And of course Robbie understood that. He had met Americans returned from France, and seen how bitter they were against the Germans; he knew how many of the young fellows had joined the French Foreign Legion, or the Lafayette Escadrille, a group of American fliers fighting for France. One day Lanny received a long typewritten letter from his father, postmarked Paris. He understood that it had been brought across by some friend or employee.
“If I were with you,” wrote the father, “I could answer all the things that people are telling you. As it is, I have to ask you to believe that I have the answers. You know that I have sources of information and do not say that I know something unless I do. I am making this emphatic because your happiness and indeed your whole future may be at stake, and I could never forgive myself if you were to get caught in the sticky flypaper which is now being set for the feet of Americans. If I thought there was any chance of this happening to you I would come at once and take you away.”
After that solemn preamble, the head of the European sales department of Budd Gunmakers went on to remind his son that this was a war of profits. “I am making them myself,” he said. “Budd's couldn't help making them unless we gave the plant away. People come and stuff them into our pockets. But I don't sell them the right to do my thinking for me.
“Germany is trying to break her way to the east, mainly to get oil, the first necessity of modern machine industry. There is oil in Rumania and the Caucasus, and more in Mesopotamia and Persia. Look up these places on the map, so as to know what I'm telling you. England, Russia, and France all have a share, while Germany has none. That's what all the shooting is about; and I am begging you to paste this up on your looking glass, or some place where you will see it every day. It's an oil man's war, and they are all patriotic, because if they lose the war they'll lose the oil. But the steel men and the coal men have worked out international cartels, so they don't have to be patriotic. They have ways of communicating across no man's land, and they do. I'm a steel man, and they talk to me, and so I get news that will never be printed.”
What the steel men were doing, Robbie explained, was selling to both sides, and getting the whole world into their debt. Robbie's own income for this year of 1916 would be five times what it had been before the war, and the profits of the biggest American powder and chemical concern would be multiplied by ten. “The gentleman whom you met with me in Monte Carlo is keeping very quiet nowadays; he doesn't want to attract attention to what he is doing, which is stuffing money into all the hiding places he can find. I would wager that his profits before this slaughter is over will be a quarter of a billion dollars. He has put himself in the same position as ourselves — he couldn't help making money if he wanted to.”
But that wasn't all. These international industrialists had taken entire charge of the war so far as their own properties were concerned. The military men were allowed to destroy whatever else they pleased, but nothing belonging to Krupp and Thyssen and Stinnes, the German munitions kings who had French connections and investments, or anything belonging to Schneider and the de Wendels, masters of the Comite des Forges, who had German connections and investments. Any army man who attempted to win the war by that forbidden method would be sent to some part of the fighting zone that was less dangerous for the steel kings and more dangerous for him.
Said the father: “I could tell you a hundred different facts which I know, and which all fit into one pattern. The great source of steel for both France and Germany is in Lorraine, called the Briey basin; get your map and look it up, and you will see that the battle line runs right through it. On one side the Germans are getting twenty or thirty million tons of ore every year and smelting it into steel, and on the other side the French are doing the same. On the French side the profits are going to Francois de Wendel, President of the Comite des Forges and member of the Chamber of Deputies; on the other side they are going to his brother Charles Wendel, naturalized German subject and member of the Reichstag. Those huge blast furnaces and smelters are in plain sight; but no aviators even tried to bomb them until recently. Then one single attempt was made, and the lieutenant who had charge of it was an employee of the Comite des Forges. Surprisingly, the attempt was a failure.”
Robbie went on to explain that the same thing was happening to the four or five million tons of iron ore which Germany was getting from Sweden; the Danish line which brought this ore to Germany had never lost a vessel, in that service or any other, and the Swedish railroads which carried the ore burned British coal. “If it hadn't been for this,” wrote the father, “Germany would have been out of the war a year ago. It's not too much to say that every man who died at Verdun, and everyone who has died since then, has been a sacrifice to those businessmen who own the newspapers and the politicians of France. That is why I tell you, if you are going to be patriotic, let it be for the American steel kings, of whom you may some day be one. Don't be patriotic for Schneider and the de Wendels, nor for Deterding, nor for Zaharoff!”
VI
Lanny kept that letter and studied it, and thought about it as hard as he knew how. He did not fail to note the curious thing that Marcel had commented upon, the similarity of his father's views with those of the outlawed uncle. The uncle and the father agreed upon the same set of facts, and they even drew the same conclusion — that nobody ought to be patriotic. The point where they split was that Robbie said you had to stuff your pockets, because you couldn't help it; whereas Uncle Jesse — Lanny wasn't sure what he wanted, but apparently it was to empty Robbie's pockets!
Lanny took this letter to his mother, and it threw her into a panic. Politics and high finance didn't mean much to her, but she thought about the effect of such news upon her husband, and made Lanny promise not to mention it to him. Just now he was putting the finishing touches on his “Sister of Mercy,” and was much absorbed in it. If the French weren't winning the war, at least they weren't losing it, so Marcel 'could be what his wife called “rational.” As it happened, it was in that Briey district that he had been sitting in a kite balloon, surveying those blast furnaces and smelters which were the source of the enemy's fighting power. He had been praying for the day when France might have enough planes to destroy them. If now the terrible idea was suggested to him that la patrie had the power, but was kept from using it by traitors, who could guess what frenzy might seize him?